Average commute time, explained

What it measures

Average commute time is the mean one-way travel time to work, in minutes, for the population 16 and older who worked outside the home in the past week. The Census asks each worker for the typical time it takes them to travel from home to work; the published average is the arithmetic mean across all responding workers. The figure does not include workers who worked from home (their commute time is recorded as zero and excluded from the average), which became a much more material exclusion starting in 2020.

The Census also publishes median commute time, which is less sensitive to a small number of very long commutes, but the mean is the more widely cited figure.

Why it matters

Average commute is a structural feature of a metro's transportation system and labor market. Long commutes are a tax on workers' time, a drag on labor-force participation among parents and caregivers, and a leading driver of employee dissatisfaction in surveys. Commute length influences housing-location decisions for hundreds of millions of US workers and predicts air-quality patterns, transportation infrastructure spending priorities, and the long-run viability of metro-wide labor markets. Metros where commutes have grown faster than population are typically experiencing housing-supply constraints in job-rich areas, forcing workers to commute longer distances.

How the Census measures it

ACS Table B08303, Travel Time to Work. The Census asks each commuter to estimate the typical one-way time in 12 brackets from "less than 5 minutes" to "90 or more minutes." CensusEasy computes the mean from the bracket midpoints (using 5 minutes for "less than 5" and 95 minutes for "90 or more"). The figure for 1990 uses ACS-equivalent methods derived from the long-form decennial.

How to read the numbers

The US average commute is about 27 minutes one-way. State averages range from about 19 minutes (South Dakota, North Dakota) to over 33 minutes (New York, New Jersey, Maryland). Among large metros, the longest commutes are in the New York, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Atlanta metros, all over 30 minutes on average, with sizable subsets of commuters spending more than an hour each way. The shortest are in mid-sized metros where job centers are well-distributed (Buffalo, Wichita, Tulsa). A metro average above 30 minutes is high; above 35 means meaningful workforce is spending more than 12 hours per week commuting.

Caveats and limitations

The metric excludes people who worked from home, which was negligible before 2020 (about 5% of workers) but rose to 18% nationally by 2022 and has settled around 14% in 2024 ACS data. Metros with high WFH shares now report shorter average commutes than they would have in 2019, because the longest in-office commuters disproportionately switched to remote work. To compare commute times across the WFH transition cleanly, look at the metric alongside the work-from-home rate.